‘Yes,’ Michal agreed with her, ‘this is not good …’

The Ward spun. I wanted to vomit. My stomach was dizzy, gawking and rasping. Uhuhuhuh Margaret Rose held out a kidney dish and Michal got paper towels and cleaned up to my barrage of silent sorrys and helped me into pyjamas bottoms as Margaret Rose tied back my hair and pulled the hoody up on my arms.

‘Don’t worry. I leave it far outside the unit and carry you a little.’ Michal said, kindly reassuring me. I made a grab for my red lipstick on my nightstand and Margaret Rose picked it up, twisted it out from its tube, and then she dotted it along my bottom lip. ‘Pout, good,’ she said, but my lips were so dry it soaked right in. She pouted too as she put another few layers of dots on both lips, like a Seurat painting, and then a little on her fingers and rubbed it into my cheeks, like one of my kids’ paintings. Michal and Margaret Rose stood back and clasped hands like I was a daughter they had dressed up for a debutante ball.

*

Inpatients and outpatients share Hospital waiting rooms, so that arriving in an outpatient waiting room after being a Hospital inmate is a shock to the system The suddenness is disconcerting, coming up against outsiders with their handbags and raincoats and umbrellas and proper make-up, real people.

‘I parks chair,’ Michal said. ‘You catch tight my arm, don’t worry, I hold you. We leave the chair on the corridor, hiding. No one will steal, you know?’ he said and he winked at me.

We both laughed. A little sound escaped. Maybe I just needed to get out. Alex hadn’t texted. I understood his hurt, it was overwhelming, all of it, what was happening, what I’d gone and done with my secrecy, and I wasn’t sure it would ever subside. Betrayal. But for practical reasons, I could do with a dig-out or an interpreter. Michal repeated the instructions twice and in polite parenthesis told me not to feck it up. I was not to let go of him. I was not to say I needed a chair. Otherwise we’d be all day waiting for a taxi back to the Ward.

There were strong apricot vibes on the walls in the MRI area, a crate of fruit on the roadside in France without the Monet sun. A little child with skinny hips and a large head was unsettling counters on a toy. Blue. Yellow. Red. Green. It was wooden and stark, with remnants of flecks of pizza peppers matted into the beads. His parents sat directly opposite each other, as though embarking on Battleships or Connect Four, feet shuffling, awkwardly coated in heavy anoraks. There was an angry cannula in the child’s thin arm and his skin was rejecting it, reddening. He tugged at it, and his mother jumped up and moved to him like a penguin trying to make it out to sea.